Font Size: 

Understanding which customer attributes, if any, distinguish “brand-loyal†from “transient†customers is likely to enable businesses to tailor marketing communications to each group, and allow retailers to manipulate such variables. Researchers in the 1990s identified various types of customer loyalty, including monopolistic, incentivized, and emotional. This present research concentrates on emotional loyalty, as retailers may not have the market position necessary to attain monopolistic or incentivized loyalty. The purpose of this research is to determine if brand loyal customers display emotional loyalty and if any demographic or sociographic variables differ between brand-loyal and transient customers. The population considered in this quantitative study consisted of customers shopping at greater-Philadelphia-area brick-and-mortar stores of three women’s specialty clothing brands, each segmented into brand-loyal and transient based on customer prior purchase activity. Customers were contacted via e-mail and asked to complete a Likert scale survey including some questions intended to measure their degree of emotional loyalty. Survey responses were then matched back to the customers’ historical purchase activity and appended demographic and sociographic attributes. Of the variables considered, customer age appears significantly related to loyalty, but the directions of the relationships vary depending on the retailers’ target customer age ranges.

CRM; Customer Relationship Marketing; Loyalty